Fragments of Noir

Sunday, 14 June 2026

Stephen Frears

The Grifters

Dirty Pretty Things

The Hit

Mary Reilly

Fail Safe

Yet for many Noir aficionados, You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up remains one of the most evocative and subversive novels of it's time. No mean feat when you consider it's back room competitors ; Cain's Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses Don't They ? and I Should Have Stayed Home, A.I Bezzerides The Long Haul, John Fante's Ask the Dust or Chandler's The Big Sleep. But as incisive as those novels are, none is quite as audacious or packs quite the same punch as You Play the Black.
..... as Hallas to distill so many of the hardboiled tropes - the drifter, unfulfilled desire, misplaced guilt, a greed-ridden culture, street-level perspective - into a coherent, if kaleidoscopic whole.

Woody Haut
Snappy and Reckless ; Richard Hallas's "You Play the Black
and the Red Comes Up"
LA Review of Books
2011

Saturday, 13 June 2026

Dark Femmes #30

Lemming - Alice Pollock

Edge of Doom - Irene

In the Cut - Frannie Avery

Belle et Bete - La Belle

Henry and June - Anais

Borderline (1950) - Madeleine Haley

Johnny Guitar - Vienna

Don't Bother to Knock - Nell Forbes

Last Seduction - Bridget Gregory

The Killing - Sherry Peatty

Restless Blood - Sylvi Sorra

Ice Harvest - Renata Crest

Naked Alibi - Marianna

Point Blank - Chris

Johnny Angel - Paulette Girard

The Driver - "The Player"

Murder My Sweet - Helen Grayle

The Square (2008) - Carla Smith

Diary of a Chambermaid - Celestine

Everything Happens to Me

Everything Happens to Me
(Adair/Dennis)
Nat King Cole

Friday, 12 June 2026

Raw Keys

Nick Musuraca, who had already photographed Stranger on the Third Floor (a film that many consider to be the first Noir) plays on shadows and lights with the eye of a painter. Instead of raw keys of light and darkness, a true convention of Noir, he used a subtle diffuse light to reveal the details of the sets, and used the key lights to support it's dramatic effects. Each scene offers captivating and original visual effects compared to previous and next ones. Musuraca uses the entire monochromatic palette and creates the richest chiaroscuro ever photographed for a Film Noir.

unknown critic
on
Out of the Past
Jacques Tourneur 1947